1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to speech recognition systems, and, more particularly, to speech recognition systems that are used within a vehicle.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many spoken language interface applications, proper names, such as street names, point of interest (POI) names, and city names, are widely used. It is often the case that the proper names used in these applications are very numerous and/or involve many foreign names, such as street names in a navigation domain or restaurant names in a restaurant selection domain. As may be readily appreciated, foreign names in particular are subject to being mispronounced or pronounced in a variety of ways. Hence, the problems with the recognition of proper names in conventional spoken language interface applications with large name lists include inadequate speech recognition accuracy of these names in the speech recognizer component, and inadequate recognition accuracy of these names with regard to the presence of these names in the system database.
Dialog systems are systems in which a person speaks to a computer or machine, in order to accomplish a result. They are becoming increasingly used to facilitate the man-machine interface in many applications such as computers and automobiles. In many spoken language interface applications, proper names, such as street names, city names, point of interest (POI) names, company names, and so on, are widely used. With data storage capacities in such systems increasing rapidly, people tend to put more and more names into their storage in the form of databases. Accessing the data with spoken language offers people convenience and efficiency if the spoken interface is reliable. It is often the case that the number of proper names used in these applications is very large, and can include many foreign or hard-to-recognize names, such as street names in a navigation domain, or restaurant names in a restaurant selection domain. In general, present recognition methods on large name lists focus strictly on the static aspect of the names. This is a very challenging problem especially for speech recognition because of the confusability in the large name lists.
What is neither disclosed nor suggested in the art is a speech recognition system and method for use in a vehicle that can take advantage of geographic location information available in the vehicle to improve the accuracy with which the system recognizes spoken words.